Forced to leave Iran after an intimate video of her was leaked, Ebrahimi has rebuilt her career. Her latest film, for which she won best actress at Cannes, celebrates the defiance of women in her home country
Fourteen years before she was named best actress at Cannes, Zar Amir Ebrahimi sat alone in her flat in Tehran, contemplating the wreckage of her life and wondering if she had the strength to keep going. An intimate video of the actor and her boyfriend had been stolen by a man she once considered a friend, and was being sold on streets across the country. Iranian authorities were drawing up a criminal case. Sex outside marriage is illegal in Iran, and she faced lashes and years in jail if convicted. Ebrahimi was only 26, and even if she was spared prison, she knew she would never be allowed to act again inside the country.
She drew on that shattering experience for her award-winning performance in Ali Abbasi’s thriller Holy Spider, as the journalist Arezoo Rahimi, who hunts down a serial killer in the north-east Iranian city of Mashhad. The cops have been largely ignoring the murderous spree on their patch, because the attacker targets only sex workers and claims to be “cleansing” the area around Iran’s most sacred shrine. Meanwhile, Rahimi’s own career in Tehran has been derailed by misogyny, after her editor sexually harassed her, and office gossips turn the assault into an “affair”. She channels this fury into a reckless search for justice for the women of this dusty pilgrimage city.
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